Sexism in Geek Culture, with a look at Comics

In the most recent Coming Out of the Basement Podcast, we discuss sexism in geek culture, with a bit of a closer look at comics (along with the Mass Effect 3 ending). For the first subject, I had enough sources and examples that I thought it made sense to do a post on the topic.

I’ve recently seen some really good discussions in the RPG industry. Paizo editor and author James Sutter’s article, Death to the Chainmail Bikini, discusses some of the issues involved. So does Wolfgang Baur in the latest issue of Kobold Quarterly (which as you can note from the cover, includes the Ecology of the Succubus). We’ve also seen several prominent female writers from the folks at KQ, like Christina Stiles, who has been editing KQ along with Miranda Horner, among others, and is writing Rogue Mage and Midgard Tales, among others. Plus, Tracy Hurley (aka Sarah Darkmagic) is working on the Prismatic Art Collection (another Kickstarter project!) which looks pretty cool. Ms. Hurley also created the Women Fighter in Reasonable Armor tumblr site, in this site’s links. [Correction! I confused Sarah Darkmagic’s “More Like This” (in the comments below) with Kirin Robinson’s Women Fighter in Reasonable Armor site. Sorry, all! They’re both worth checking out.]

Let me say that I understand this subject is discussed very well in some places online. This subject also isn’t easy for some people to talk about or, especially judging by discussion threads, think about. It’s difficult for me. At times, people get really defensive. All I’m asking is that we think about it. There are two responses-to-responses that I’d like to share. First, Sexism in Games Bingo from geekfeminism.org covers a lot of the typical, and usually inappropriate, responses to these discussions. The comments on that link are also worth reading. It’s not necessarily that those responses are wrong per se (although IMHO, many are)- it’s that a lot of them have been addressed for the upteenth time, and those arguments tend to distract from the purpose of the discussion. We can definitely use the bingo card (and its variations in other areas, like skepticism) as a shorthand to maybe consider arguments a bit more. I’m not saying people shouldn’t make any variations of those points- just consider it, and see if they’ve been addressed elsewhere. The other link I want to share is a great post from Kotaku, Nerds and Male Privilege, Part 2- Deconstructing the Arguments. Like the bingo card, it addresses some of the common, often inappropriate, responses that people have in those discussion. (Part 1 at the original siteand at Kotaku and their comments are also worth reading. Also, let me add, the attack on critical theory in the comments of the original post was one of the laziest I’ve ever seen. :P)

And finally, I’ll respond to one of the responses I’ve seen: X happens to men, too. The Deconstructing the Arguments article goes into that a bit, but I’ll also respond with what I think… I don’t think that makes it equal. I don’t think that violence against women in comics is the same thing as violence against men. If the overall comics culture didn’t have the issues it does, maybe… but it does. There are more male writers than female writers. There are more male heroes than female heroes. There’s more imagery for men than for women. So the fact that bad things happen to guys as well doesn’t necessarily mean as much as it might. Also, it may or may not be true; for example, that was a response to Women in Refrigerators. And as it turns out, that wasn’t exactly… correct. Bad things happened to male superheroes, but men tended to recover a whole lot better than their female counterparts. They even called this trait Dead Men Defrosting.

In a later post, I’ll talk about some of the writers/artists that got me interested in comics again.